The use of search engine-related solutions continues to explode, as companies look for faster and more cost-effective ways for employees to find the files and data they need to most effectively perform their jobs. In fact, according to industry analyst firm IDC, the search market grew a whopping 33 percent last year alone.
To exploit this trend, vendors are coming up with new and exciting ways for business intelligence (BI) capabilities to be integrated within search engine environments, creating broad-reaching enterprise search facilities that allow employees to rapidly find any information, inside or outside corporate boundaries, regardless of its source or format.
Just how can BI and search engine technologies converge?
One way is to provide users with the ability to easily locate reports, dashboards, scorecards, and other business intelligence content and assets via search engines. This approach makes vital, timely corporate data much easier to find, increasing productivity by accelerating the time between when a user realizes they need a certain subset of information, and when it becomes available for analysis and decision-making purposes. In other words, instead of spending time generating new ad hoc reports and queries, users can simply – and instantly – search for relevant reports that have already been generated by other users within their organization.
Another potential application of combined BI and search engine technologies would allow users to simply ask the search engine a question. The engine would then process the request, then trigger the creation of an ad hoc report based on the information needed, providing the user with supporting data from existing enterprise systems. This would enable non-IT professionals to access and analyze corporate information, without the need to understand the technical complexities associated with some reporting systems.
But perhaps the most sophisticated, and the most valuable, way in which the combination of search and BI can be utilized is by using search engine technologies to integrate both structured and unstructured information for reporting and analysis. By giving users access to other information sources outside the enterprise – such as RSS feeds, Web content, and third-party documents – companies can make even greater insight available for decision-making purposes.
The key benefits of enterprise search are significant, and include:
The future of enterprise search seems virtually unlimited, as both BI vendors and their clients seek innovative, cutting-edge ways to leverage these two technologies together to extend the reach of BI further than ever before.